


Rise Like The Phoenix

by unityManipulator



Series: R-100 (Story) [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 06:24:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6554614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unityManipulator/pseuds/unityManipulator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Character study dealing with the past of one of my OC's, Phoenix. </p><p>Originally written as a school assignment, with the topic "When is it moral to do illegal things?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Rise Like The Phoenix

                A grating laugh echoed throughout the military compound. A tank of gasoline, rigged to sit on the wearer’s back like a backpack, swung over green-clad shoulders. Two orange bands around the chest of a flameproof army jacket, the emblem of a flame on the shoulder, on the gas tank, and painted onto the nozzle of the flamethrower alongside a clumsy engraving of a bird’s feather, no deeper than the layer of paint.

                The respirator goes on next, a main oxygen tank strapped beside the gasoline, a five-minute emergency backup strapped below. It’s essentially a portable fireball, should something, anything at all, go wrong. The mask, slipped over the mouth and nose, then the goggles to keep soot out of the eyes.

                Step into heavy boots, pull the laces tight. They’re flameproof, and the bottoms of the trousers tuck over the openings of the boots and snap shut. Finally, a pair of heavy gloves, reinforced against the incredible heat of the flamethrower.

                Gearing up for a burning is never something to be taken lightly, and each movement is sharp, purposeful, yet also giddy with restrained glee.

 

                Later, in the common room, that same figure idly plays with a lighter, engraved with the same feather design. Her hair is cropped short, and there are a few patches that have clearly been singed off. A mess of burn scars cover her hands and forearms, disappearing under the sleeves of her light t-shirt. She tilts her head as she speaks, and another patch of scarred skin is visible on her neck. If she were to remove that shirt, the burns continue across her back and torso and down under the waistband of her fatigues. She wears them with pride, because to her they are a badge of honor, history branded across her skin.  The dog tag hanging from that same neck has a name and designation on it, clear as the day it was engraved four years ago. “Phoenix, # 952308, Pyro.” Three lines of text, but ones that changed her life forever.

                She’s laughing along with two others, boys this time. One wears his hair long, and his face is weary, as though he has seen the worst of this war and a thousand more like it. In a way, he has. The other has a tattoo of a black ring on his left shoulder, with cracks of red throughout it. He wears a tank top to display this tattoo, as a carrier of the R-100 virus, he has to. An eye, his left, is clouded over, just like the walkers that they fight to destroy.

                Now Phoenix turns the conversation to the day’s work, of the burning she’s done and the walkers whose lives she’s taken. Afterlives? Dead lives? Who knows what the term is, when it comes to the walking dead.  Her eyes sparkle as she talks, and why wouldn’t they? She loves her job. Finally, an opportunity for her to put herself to work has provided itself, in the form of a zombie apocalypse.

                Pyromania, the official term is. That’s what the doctor said when she was just young, and her mother was hiding the matches and candles, cooking on an electric stove for years once the gas one had become too tempting to Phoenix. Pyromania, said the foster care worker to the first of many foster parents, all the heads of families whose lives she’d ruined. Pyromania, said the doctor who tried to medicate her, control her desires and her enjoyment and the only sense of completeness she’d ever felt, because she only ever really felt _alive_ when she was watching something burn.

                It’s arson and it’s pyromania and it’s wrong, wrong, _wrong_ , they always said. It’s a disease, that’s illegal and wrong and _you can’t do that, Elise_ and _put the matches down, Elise_ and _please try not to hurt this family, Elise_.

                Because she did hurt them. She’d hurt these people, too many people, the first family and the second and the third and fourth and fifth and by that point they stopped trying, they’d locked her up in a hospital and tried to force her to stop the burnings, and one night she’d burned that building too and never looked back and soon the virus started spreading and that was the end of everyone’s morals, really.

                So she wasn’t at fault when she built a flamethrower, a shoddy little thing that could barely shoot five feet in front of her and was more likely to jam than anything. A flamethrower with a salvaged pilot light and a tank of gasoline that could only burn for a moment or two before it was empty, but a flamethrower nonetheless. She made herself a new person that night, because Elise had essentially died that night the hospital burned. Like the mythical bird itself, she had risen from the ashes. She was the Phoenix.

                She wasn’t at fault when she burned the first walker who tried to take a chunk out of her throat. She wasn’t at fault for stealing the supplies to keep improving her flamethrower, or the food, or the flameproof clothes. She stole a respirator when she started having trouble breathing, and that helped for a bit. None of that was her fault, because nobody _else_ was playing fair and keeping their damn morals anyways, so why should she?

                She began to trail off, her voice becoming quiet as her thoughts became more rampant, her eyes staring blankly at the carpet, the cap of the lighter clicking open and shut.

                It wasn’t her fault, and yet it was and it wasn’t but she had hurt people she had _killed_ people and she was only doing it to survive but who said _she_ was the one who should survive over anyone else and she had _burned_ people _alive_ , she was a _bad person_ for that because who _wouldn’t_ say that she was and… and…

                She barely managed to get out the door, a muttered “need a cig” barely leaving her lips before she was gone, flicking  her lighter open and shut, open and shut. It was her last tether to reality, until she ripped the cigarette from her pocket, lighting it smoothly and taking a drag. Once she manages to steady her breathing, she crushes the butt between the heel of her boot and returns inside, reminding herself of one simple truth.

                It was either killing them or letting innocent people die.

**Author's Note:**

> [shrugs] visit my tumblr @ MotherfuckingMogar.tumblr.com or my deviantART @ unityManipulator.deviantart.com


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